About June and Jer

I’m told I need to identify myself — although since this is a jointly held blog, the identification must be about “ourselves.” We are June and Jerry Underwood, Portland, Oregon, parents of one child, grandparents of one child, owner of one 1995 Honda sedan (this might change someday, although we’re hoping we’ll be too old to drive when it happens). We live in a Portland foursquare, built in 1900, and love our city and our state and our country, although we decidedly have views about directions all three should go in.

Married 47 years (as of 2010), we decided on an Amtrak trip some years ago that doing a joint blog might be fun. This was after websites had become ubiquitous (Jer did my first version of my website) but long before Facebook or even MySpace. We wanted a place to let distant family members know we were still alive, and a place to talk about and show instances of life and art (me) and photographs (him). The blog has jogged along much as we have jogged along. Jer has now become a serious Wikipedia volunteer, editing and writing and reviewing, and I have moved from textile art to painting on canvas and masonite. I still do some textile work.

We live a quite conventional life from our point of view, although others might think what we view as conventional isn’t exactly aligned with conventional notions of conventions. For example: neither of us likes big furniture and I like lots of room to work, so we have a modular “living room” — mostly a textile studio but able to be converted into a place to convene with friends, provided you don’t want a couch. I also have a separate painting studio, where my more painterly self gets to fling bits of color. Jer has his upstairs -away-from-the-world office with two computers, generally running concurrently, and shelves of research materials.

We have had a variety of lives and ways of living, moving from Pennsylvania to Virginia to Wyoming to Long Island to Kansas to Oregon, and as I do artist residencies, we continue to explore the wonders of the western US. There’s a lot more, but you can read the blog to discover bits and pieces of it and, as usual, we can tell stories until your eyes glaze over if you really inquire.